Why availability matters

You've heard how about 1% of visits to your site don't get the full site -- don't get the JavaScript or the CSS or something. And that means it's like this:

Almost everybody

An Opera Mini user in Indonesia, or an IE6 corporate user, or someone weird who turns JavaScript off

And then you think, well, 1%, that isn't a big deal. And to be honest, that 1%, I feel sorry for them, but they're not really our target audience anyway. It's lots of effort to make our web app available to everybody, and it's just not worth it. Good idea, but we've got priorities and a backlog. Maybe we'll do it next time.

It isn't like that.

It's like this:

Almost everybody

An Opera Mini user in Indonesia, or an IE6 corporate user, or someone weird who turns JavaScript off

It's not 1% of people who always can't see your site and 99% of people who always can. It's 1% of visits. Almost all the people who don't get your site correctly actually should have been able to. They don't have JavaScript turned off. They're not browsing on a WAP phone over a 2g connection from a shanty town. They're you, in a cellar bar or a hotel room or waiting for the phone network to wake back up.

What if they bailed after a few failures? If you're using a web app and it doesn't work, maybe you'll shrug and hit refresh, or toggle your phone into airplane mode and back out again. But when that happens a second time? A third? A fourth? Will you think "huh, native apps don't do this!" and be annoyed? Maybe you won't, because you're a web developer and you understand the difference between the network failing, the browser failing, and the site failing. You understand the technology.

So if people leave and don't come back after a few failures…

Almost everybody

An Opera Mini user in Indonesia, or an IE6 corporate user, or someone weird who turns JavaScript off

That's why you need to make your site's availability as high as possible. Because most of the time you're like . But occasionally you're all . But with sites that have good availability, you're always .